About a year ago I stopped making regular updates to this blog to concentrate on my Namnesia Antidote blog. While that is an ongoing effort, I am starting what should be about a year long effort to revitalize the concept of a "This Day in History" blog. I have decided to leave this blog intact and as-is, using a new "This Day in History 2.0" blog for my expanded and full version. Please feel free to email with your ideas. The two tables below should allow you to find a posting for the "Day in History" you wish to research.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

October 23......

October 23 is the 296th (297th in leap years) day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 69 days remaining in the year on this date.

Best Liberal Quote of the Day: On Humanism "In the end, anti-black, anti-female, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing—anti-humanism." — Shirley Chisholm

Stupidest and/or Scariest Quote from the Right for the Day: On Coup D'Etat 2000 "I believe Secretary Cheney and I won the vote in Florida. And I believe some are determined to keep counting in an effort to change the legitimate result." — George W. "War Criminal" Bush, on the hand recounts requested by Al Gore in some Florida counties. Ron Fournier, "County stops recount in blow to Gore: Presidential race reaches new levels of unpredictability," Charleston (WV) Gazette, 11-23-00. The GOP Bush team strongly opposed hand recounts in Florida counties typically considered Democratic. However, the GOP requested and was granted a hand recount in some Republican counties in New Mexico for the same reasons cited by Al Gore in Florida. Wayne Barrett, "The five worst Republican outrages," Village Voice, 12-26-00.

Dumbest Thing Said for the Day: From Politics "I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future." — Dan Quayle, vice president under President George H. W. Bush, is perhaps better known for his verbal blunders than for his politics. Let us pause and remember the ol' days of the first Bush administration, when men were men and a potato was a potatoe. Quayle is Hall of Shame member #3. {A grasp on reality also seems to be fleeting.}

{Disclaimer: I have attempted to give credit to the many different sources that I get entries. Any failure to do so is unintentional. Any statement enclosed by brackets like these are the opinion of the blogger, A Proud Liberal.}

● 1812 - Claude François de Malet, a French general, begins a conspiracy to overthrow Napoleon Bonaparte, claiming that the Emperor died in Russia and that he was now the commandant of Paris. De Malet is executed on October 29.

● 1813 - The Pacific Fur Company trading post in Astoria, Oregon is turned over to the rival British North West Company (the fur trade in the Pacific Northwest was dominated for the next three decades by the United Kingdom).

● 1885 - Birth of Andre Lorulot, France. Free-thinker, individualist, lecturer and propagandist. Imprisoned in 1907 for inciting soldiers to revolt. Taken with the Bolshevik Revolution, he broke with the anarchists. Later joined the Federation of Free Thinkers, and in 1958 became its president.

● 1894 - Birth of Marcel Body, Limoges, France. Typographer. Joined the Bolshevik Revolution as a French soldier in Russia, becomes a citizen and in the diplomatic service in Norway with Alexandra Kollontan. Criticizing the drift of the Revolution, returned to France. Translates Lenin, Trotsky, and Bakunin. Thereafter wrote for the anarchist and pacifist press.

● 1906 - Alberto Santos-Dumont flies an airplane in the first heavier-than-air flight in Europe at Champs de Bagatelle, Paris, France.

● 1911 - First use of aircraft in war: an Italian pilot takes off from Libya to observe Turkish army lines during the Turco-Italian War.

● 1912 - First Balkan War: The Battle of Kumanovo between the Serbian and Ottoman armies begins.

● 1915 - Woman's suffrage: In New York City, 25,000-33,000 women march on Fifth Avenue to advocate their right to vote.

● 1921 - Massive demonstrations all over Europe in support of condemned U.S. anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. In Paris 10,000 police and 18,000 soldiers attempt to control the crowds.

● 1926 - Leon Trotsky expelled from Soviet Politburo. Never catches on to the fact that he is a victim of the very flawed system he did so much to create.

● 1926 - Suffragette Olympia Brown dies, Baltimore, Maryland.

● 1929 - Great Depression: After a steady decline in stock market prices since a peak in September, the New York Stock Exchange begins to show signs of panic.

● 1929 - The first North American transcontinental air service begins between New York City and Los Angeles, California.

● 1935 - Dutch Schultz, Abe Landau, Otto Berman, and Bernard "Lulu" Rosenkrantz are fatally shot at a saloon in Newark, New Jersey in what will become known as The Chophouse Massacre.

● 1941 - World War II: Field Marshal Georgy Zhukov takes command of Red Army operations designed to prevent the further advance into Russia of German forces and to prevent the German armies from capturing Moscow.

● 1941 - Burning of the Odessa, Ukraine, Jews: 19,000 Jews are burned alive at Dalnik in Odessa, by Romanian and German troops. The next day, another 10,000 Jews are killed. Romanian Lieutenant-Colonel Nicolae Deleanu administered the executions.

● 1942 - World War II: The Second Battle of El Alamein starts - At El Alamein in northern Egypt, the British Eighth Army under Field Marshal Montgomery begin a critical offensive to expel the Axis armies from Egypt, never to return.

● 1942 - All 12 passengers and crewmen aboard an American Airlines DC-3 airliner are killed when it is struck by a U.S. Army Air Forces bomber near Palm Springs, California. Among the victims is award-winning composer and songwriter Ralph Rainger ("Thanks for the Memory," "Love in Bloom," and "Blue Hawaii").

● 1944 - World War II: The Battle of Leyte Gulf begins - The largest naval battle in history begins in the Philippines; and also, the Soviet Red Army enters Hungary.

● 1945 - Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers signs Jackie Robinson to the club's Triple A farm team, the Montreal Royals. In a little under 18 months, Robinson will be called up to the majors, the first African-American to play major league baseball in the white leagues and an enormous symbolic breakthrough for black civil rights.

● 1946 - The United Nations General Assembly convened for the first time, at an auditorium in Flushing Meadow, New York.

● 1951 - NAACP pickets the Stork Club in support of Josephine Baker, who has been refused admission a week earlier. After a city-convened special committee calls Baker's charges unfounded, Thurgood Marshall calls the findings a "complete and shameless whitewash of the long-established and well-known discriminatory policies of the Stork Club."

● 1956 - Hungarian revolution begins. Spontaneous workers' councils form, state capitalism threatened, Russian tanks called in. 250,000 people, many students, workers, and soldiers, demonstrate in Budapest in support of the insurrection in Poland, demanding reforms in Hungary. Security police fire into the unarmed demonstrators, killing several. Unfortunately, the U.S. government, Radio Free America, the CIA, and others had long been telling Hungarians that if they rose up and threw off their communist shackles for capitalist ones, they would be helped by the "free" West. Instead they were left helpless.

● 1962 - 124 arrested in demonstrations at U.S. and U.S.S.R. embassies in London against Cuban Missile Crisis.

● 1983 - A French army barracks in Lebanon is also hit that same morning, killing 58 troops.

● 1987 - Senate rejects President Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Judiciary Committee found Bork unfit, due to insensitivity to individual rights and liberties. The 58-42 vote is the biggest margin of rejection for the position in history. Bork went on to a career as a far- right-wing syndicated political columnist, exposing the fiction that judges are politically neutral arbiters of truth. If rejected, Clarence Thomas probably would have tried something similar, except he's not as smart as Bork.

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About Me

Life long Liberal. Actually saw JFK on campaign trail. Defining moment of my life was the assassination of JFK. First presidential election I participated in was knocking on doors for McGovern, have been tilting at windmills ever since.